Edgar Ritchie, writing from Hettyfield, Douglas, Cork, tells me that in Killarney the Methodist church is situated in a part of the town called The Ha-ha. Recently two large sunken ditches in the church grounds have been filled in and these areas will be landscaped when the ground dries. Mr Ritchie is interested in the origin of the word, also found as ah!ah! and haw-haw.
It originated in France, it seems. Oxford defines it as `a boundary to a garden, pleasure ground or park, of such a kind as not to interrupt the view from within, and not to be seen until closely approached; consisting of a trench, the inner side of which is perpendicular and faced with stone, the outer sloping and turfed: a sunken fence'.
The word came into English in 1712, through James's translation of a famous French book on gardening by Le Blond. Nobody has since questioned the Frenchman's etymology; `It surprises, and makes one cry ah! ah!'.
You'll find these ha-has in many of the old estates in Ireland. There's a fine one in the grounds of the Belair Hotel near Ashford, Co. Wicklow. Roger Casement once spent a summer mending it, as it had started to crumble. Why did they demolish the Killarney ones, I wonder? It seems such a pity.
From ha-has to half-boats. John Holmes, an English visitor to Kinsale, heard the term used down there by a man who was describing a sturdy craft that, he assures me, he would trust to get him safely around Cape Horn. It wasn't a little half-decked boat, mind you. This was an ocean-going yacht.
I'm pretty sure that what Mr Holmes heard was haaf boat, a term used in Scotland and in Shetland as well as in some of the Irish fishing ports. I heard it myself in Kilmore Quay from old Bill Blake, God rest him, and I remember writing it down as half-boat in error. A haaf-boat is one suitable for deep-sea fishing. Haaf means the open sea, the deep-sea fishing ground. The word is from Old Norse haf, the sea. It survives in modern Swedish as haf, and in Norwegian and Danish as hav.
Jane Reid from Banbridge recently heard an old man speak of the loysthers, beatings, he used to get in school. From Irish? asks Jane. No. Here we go again, back to the Vikings. Ljosta is an Old Norse verb which means to strike.